Fabricated snack products prepared from dough comprising starch-based materials are well-known in the art. These doughs typically comprise dehydrated potato products such as dehydrated potato flakes, granules, and/or flanules. The dough can also comprise a number of other starch-based ingredients, such as wheat, corn, rice, tapioca, barley, cassava, oat, sago, and potato starches, as well as flours. These other starch-based ingredients are typically included in the dough in lesser quantities than the dehydrated potato products. But these conventional flours and starches are typically low in both natural sugar and fiber. Thus the fabricated snack products lack the consumer preferred sweet taste and the nutritionally beneficial high fiber content.
Sugar and fiber can be added to the dough to increase the sweetness and nutritiousness of a fabricated snack product, but not without problems. Added fiber can negatively affect the flavor and texture of the snack product, and high levels of added sugar has a negative effect on the taste and texture of the product when cooked at high temperatures. For example, dough that comprises dehydrated potato products with sufficient added sugar such that when the dough is fried it forms a sweet tasting snack chip, will produce a rubbery, soggy and not glassy chip.
Consumers strongly prefer crisp, dense snack chips.
Sweet potatoes are naturally high in reducing sugar, vitamins and fiber. These qualities make them an excellent candidate for use in sweet tasting snack product. But formulating consumer acceptable snack products from sweet potatoes has been problematic at best, and in most cases entirely unsuccessful.
Specifically, sweet potatoes can be sliced and fried like a standard potato, but the results are substantially different. Natural products such as sweet products with high reducing sugars during cooking become rubbery and to bring them to the glassy state requires more energy, that is, they must be cooked at very high temperature. Increasing the temperature causes the product to burn or caramelized, with the resulting off-flavor and bitter taste. Therefore, the manufacturer faces the option of either frying the product to high moisture content in the finished snack, which retains the flavor but does not provide the requisite crispness, or cook the product more to make it crispy, but with a burnt flavor. This results in products with substantial variation in color, and in finished moisture content, which affect texture and product stability.
Product stability is important and relates to how fast the product will become soggy or stale, and how the product will oxidize because of the high water content. A fried slice of sweet potato, for example, will become soggy and much less crisp much faster than a standard fried potato chip when the two products are exposed to the environment. Consumers have grown accustomed to snack chips with a crispy texture and eating quality of potato, corn, and wheat based snacks, and breaking from that established equity is difficult. Moreover, the color and texture of sweet potato varies substantially both before and after frying. Consumers prefer a standardized product. That is, when a consumer opens a bag or canister of snack products, they expect a certain degree of uniformity. Again, the color of a fried sweet potato can vary substantially.
There are sweet potato based snacks currently available. These products include whole sweet potatoes sliced and fried, extruded products, and vacuum fried chips. While these commercially available products enjoy some consumer acceptance, they are still not substitutes for, nor do they provide a crispy, crunchy and light texture comparable to that found in consumer preferred potato chips.
Hence, there exists a need for formulae and processes for making fabricated snack products with sweet potato flour, while maintaining certain textural qualities that consumers prefer. And there is a need for a dough made from a sweet potato flour composition that can consistently deliver the texture, flavor, and appearance of the product to the consumer. And there is a need for a snack chip that is made from a sheet of dough or extruded, and then fried, partially fried and then baked, or baked.
There exists also a need for formulae and processes for making snacks with relatively high levels of natural sugar, vitamins and fiber, but with the texture and taste of products favorite snacks such as potato chips.
This and other advantages of the invention will become apparent from the following disclosure.